Tag: Unemployment

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

In his inimitable “twisting mainstream economics in as progressive direction as he can accomplish” style, Paul Krugman has made a splash among those following the challenge of our headlong and reckless pursuit of Climate Chaos with a column on the cost of policies to put the brakes on that reckless gamble.

Hat tip to A Siegal, who nailed a critical failing of Krugman’s analysis:

Krugman falls into the trap of discussing the costs of dealing with climate change … a robust cost/benefits analysis would … result in a very serious statement as to the “huge risks and costs of inaction vs the very serious benefits of action”.

In particular, it is a common failing of mainstream economics to assume an economy that naturally tends to full employment, so that policies that boost employment are a cost, when in the real world they are a benefit.

Of course, the oil-industry funded belief tanks will be promoting the idea that Krugman is overstating the case for taking action against climate chaos … when the reality is that he overstates the cost to the public of taking action and so understates the case for taking action.

If you count all the people unemployed or under employed in the US today, you have a population of almost thirty million.

A country about the size of Canada.

…

In this episode of FaultLines we explore Washington’s failure of imagination in dealing with unemployment, and we visit places where creative experiments in job creation are emerging from the grassroots.

Real News Network – April 9, 2010 – 23 min 30 sec

Out of work in the US

Al Jazeera: Tens of millions of Americans unemployed are a ‘social state of emergency’

Burning the Midnight Oil for a Brawny Recovery

The March Jobs Report has come, and though there appears to have been some employment growth in the rose colored glasses retailing sector, in most other sectors, the headline is that the Job Free Recovery continues.

There are three main numbers to focus on when looking at the monthly employment report:

• employment
• the headline unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted
• the broad (“U6”) unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted

… so let’s have a look at them.

The monthly jobs report from ADP always appears about a week before the BLS announces their numbers, with the additional difference that ADP only measures private-sector employment, which once again declined in March 2010 by about 23,000 jobs, in contrast to what you might call a consensus forecast that private-sector payrolls would increase by 50,000.

Republicans are busily spinning this decline as yet another demonstration that Obama’s stimulus has failed, and they are especially busy spinning right now because the BLS is expected to report a significant increase in payrolls, because their numbers include public-sector employment, which just got a boost from the Census.

“Everyone understands that temporary census hiring may inflate the statistics released on Friday, but the American people will rightly continue to ask, ‘Where are the jobs?'”

Meanwhile Tim Geithner is also busy lowering expectations to make the BLS report on Friday look like a happy surprise!

“The economy’s growing now, that’s the first step,” Geithner said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show. “But the unemployment rate is still terribly high, and it’s going to stay unacceptably high for a long time.”

The bottom line, or at least a line about half way to the bottom, is that for the first time in any month since February 2008, more jobs have been created than lost, which means that the spindly little line of of net change in total public and private employment will probably creep above zero!

And now that we know, or almost know that, what exactly do we know, or almost know?

Not much.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Update: The BLS posted their new unemployment numbers this morning, and just as Republicans feared and Democrats hoped, about 162,000 jobs were added to payrolls in March 2010.

And of course the usual cloud of mystery surrounds those numbers.

Since the BLS counts 15,000,000 as unemployed in their top count, and 162,000 jobs were added, you might expect unemployment to decrease in about the same ratio as 162,000/15,000,000.

In that ratio, unemployment would have fallen at least a wee little bit, maybe to 9.6%. More jobs, less unemployment! Right?

Wrong.

One catch, among many catches, is that many of the newly employed hadn’t been “officially unemployed” before they got their new jobs.

They appeared out of nowhere! Or at least, out of nowhere where anyone was counting them as “unemployed.” They weren’t officially looking for jobs, until they heard about some jobs to look for, with the Census, for example, and then…

They looked!

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

The lack of a comprehensive PUBLIC OPTION makes this bill a fucking joke.

It’s not over yet since the Senate still has to vote on it for it to be finalized.

Here are the final touches to the bill that were passed as well.

Does it matter though?

Tom DeLay Delusion says that Sen. Jim Bunning was “brave” for blocking an extension in unemployment benefits.

DeLay subscribes to the notion that people only try to find jobs when their benefits run out.

This video is from CNN’s State of the Union, broadcast March 7, 2010

RawStory today

(The dark blue line that looks like a broken string is now.)

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics…

Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed (-36,000) in February, and the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent.

The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased from 8.3 to 8.8 million in February, partially offsetting a large decrease in the prior month. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

There was a little more bad news on the BLS summary table of unemployment, which showed an increase of 139,000 in the number of “discouraged workers” who have given up looking for work, between January 2010 and February 2010.

Along with the increase of 500,000 “involuntarily part-time” workers from 8.3 to 8.8 million, there was plenty of bad news, although most of the corporate media described it as “not as bad as expected,” and so on.

Some economic cheerleaders also tried to blame the bad numbers on bad weather, although the BLS had taken the trouble to shoot down this excuse before it got off the ground.

In order for severe weather conditions to reduce the estimate of payroll employment, employees have to be off work for an entire pay period and not be paid for the time missed. About half of all workers in the payroll survey have a 2-week, semi-monthly, or monthly pay period.

So unless you were a day laborer, or snowed in for at least a week, your employment status didn’t change, and snow won’t explain away the bad news.

Even according to Obama’s advisors, his economic “stimulus” has already contributed most of what they expect it to contribute to reducing unemployment.

The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it’s largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, “By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth,” adding that she didn’t expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011.

And in the same excellent article from the Atlantic which I linked above, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson describes some bleak consequences of long-term unemployment for black communities…

“One problem that has plagued the black community over the years is resignation,” Wilson said–a self-defeating “set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how to respond,” passed from parent to child. “And I think there was sort of a feeling that norms of resignation would weaken somewhat with the Obama election. But these hard economic times could reinforce some of these norms.”

Wilson, age 74, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the “very bleak” future he sees for the neighborhoods that he’s spent a lifetime studying. There is “no way,” he told me, “that the extremely high jobless rates we’re seeing won’t have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods.”

Unemployment in Detroit approaches 50%

Although 83% of Democrats (meaning “TV-intoxicated monkeys”) still approve of Obama’s “job performance,” which isn’t much different from approving of the “job performance” of a hockey puck that Republicans have been slapping around for 13 months…

Although millions of TV-intoxicated monkeys still approve of Obama’s “performance” as President, which isn’t much different from approving of Donald Duck’s “performance” as King Lear…

While the economy continues to shed jobs, the war in Afghanistan gets bigger, Obama’s generals talk about “delaying” withdrawal from Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of workers give up even looking for work every month…

Democratic monkey-economists are constantly paraded around the networks to explain how Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” succeeded, because without Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” everything would be even worse…

And the Democratic monkey-economists know that everything would be even worse without Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” because none of them can predict or explain fuck-all, and the economic melt-down hit us like a run-away bus without so much as one millisecond of warning from Democratic monkey-economists or the Democratic monkey-politicians who rolled and rolled and rolled over for Bush for eight long years.

But instead of believing all those ridiculous monkeys and their catastrophically discredited theories, maybe we should ask ourselves how many jobs the same amount of money as Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” could have created if Obama had simply hired workers for public works.

If we spread out the “stimulus” of $780 billion over five years, and hired workers at $30,000 per annum, which would give a working mom and dad, for example, a respectable middle-class income of $60,000, then 1,000,000 jobs cost $30 billion per year, and $150 billion over five years, so…

The same amount of money as Obama’s idiotic “stimulus” could have created and maintained more than 5,000,000 jobs for five years.

5,000,000 jobs for five years!

But instead the monkey-Democrats and President “Hockey-Puck” Obama…

Instead the monkey-Democrats and President “Donald Duck” Obama gave us…

An idiotic “stimulus” stuffed with tax cuts, and 4,000,000 jobs disappeared since January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States.